Efficiency considerations for Sommerfeld effect attenuation

Abstract

In rotating machinery with a flexible foundation used for vibration isolation, the drive (motor) is designed to provide maximum power at the critical speed so that the rotor can be coasted up to a supercritical operating speed. Over the time, rotors develop some degree of unbalance and it may be impossible to balance the rotors in-situ, such as in a wind turbine. Therefore, oversized motors are used in anticipation of some unbalance. To promote passage through resonance, without altering the motor, various kinds of additional hardware and/or control mechanisms have been proposed in the past. On the other hand, simply increasing the foundation (or structural) damping reduces the amplitude of unbalance induced vibrations and the motor power requirement at the critical speed. This appears to be the simplest possible solution and has been proposed in relevant mathematical research. However, it is shown in this article that increasing foundation damping significantly reduces the overall system efficiency at the supercritical operating speed and it should not be at all considered as a meaningful engineering solution. In fact, the loss of efficiency due to the increased foundation damping is so large that it may not be compensated by a redesigned motor.